Writing: 2009
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Top Tunes 2009
My favourite music of 2009.
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Week 340
Summing up 2009, which, again, has felt too aimless.
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Finishability
BERG’s video about digital magazines mentions the importance of a magazine being finishable, which is also true for news.
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Week 338
Finishing Misfits, learning Django, turning down work.
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Making news easier to read online
The New York Times Skimmer is an improvement over most newspaper websites, but it’s not there yet.
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Is modern web design too like print design?
I’ve been wondering whether we’ve lost the “webness” of web design, whether it’s all too dull and influenced by print design.
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Week 337
Work tailing off, and needing to be firm with myself to Get Things Done.
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A dispiriting blank side
How writers and an artist cope with the blank page.
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Week 336
Moving into the “learning and making things” phase that fills the spaces between work.
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Week 335
Misfits is slowing down and the end is in sight.
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How’s the acting going?
More than a year on, people still keep asking me this. Short answer: “It’s not.” But that’s fine.
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Not too many buttons
The problem with the OpenOfficeMouse isn’t too many buttons. It’s more fundamental.
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Misfits
The “Misfits Online Experience” has just launched, with all code by me for Six To Start.
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New London Review of Books website
I did much of the HTML/CSS for the newly-relaunched LRB website.
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Flickr machine tags for film photos
Creating Flickr machine tags to store information about photos taken on film.
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Haddock Blogs down for a bit
Haddock.org is down for a bit, but the RSS feeds are now back up and running.
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Games have rules
Frustrated by the lack of rules in Foursquare making me feel like a loser.
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The £10,000 playlist
Why do we need a collection of MP3s when we can stream everything? What does that collection mean to us?
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A still more glorious dawn awaits
Getting excited about outer space futures for the first time in years.
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I want to care
The mainstream political parties don’t need social media strategies. They need policies that we can care about.
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Stilt-walking ants
Some fun things about ants.
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Stand on the right
What advice would you give to people visiting London for the first time?
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Time to follow Samuel Pepys
If you’re ever going to follow Samuel Pepys on Twitter you should start now.
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Ununited Eurasia
I worked on a project with Six to Start to promote Muse’s new single.
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All that guff
Clarifying a couple of issues in my previous piece about newspapers’ problems.
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Why do you like running?
Having complained about the quality of newspapers, now I’ complaining about TV and radio news.
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Anyone can write this crap
David Simon wants newspapers to be as good as they once were and start charging. I’m not sure they were ever that good.
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No one will be pointing at them
If all websites cost money to read, what would I pay for?
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Shownar
I recently worked on Shownar, a new website about which BBC TV and radio programmes are surprisingly popular.
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The highwalks are an island
A response to Will Wiles’ post ‘In Praise of Beech Street’.
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When theft isn’t theft
Why I dislike the use of the word “theft” in relation to illegal downloading of software, music, movies, etc.
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Twittering betimes
Samuel Pepys is on Twitter but doesn’t have many friends. Here’s why you should be his friend.
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Mailman Archive Scraper
A Python script I wrote that scrapes a Mailman mailing list archive and republishes it elsewhere, with some optional additional changes.
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Email improvisation
Guidelines for successful improvisation, whether on stage or on a mailing list about an imaginary office.
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Pretend Office
I’ve been enjoying myself on the employee mailing list of a fictitious company.
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A tiny, tiny fraction
I’ve archived a few GeoCities sites that will otherwise soon be wiped from the web by Yahoo.
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Ugly and neglected fragments
GeoCities is an ugly disorganised mess. But it’s still a huge shame that Yahoo! is closing the whole thing down.
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Google Street View
Google Street View is currently at its least amazing stage. Two thoughts on why and how it will get better as the years go by.
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It’s not a race
Wondering why the BBC continually schedules hit US TV shows in bizarre ways, as if they don’t want anyone to watch them.
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Liking something the wrong way
I was banned from a Flickr user’s photos for favouriting them too often.
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SXSW 2009
A summary of my experience of the conference.
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Old Think for Old Publishers
The ‘New Think for Old Publishers’ panel at SXSW 09 was an exercise in failing to managing expectations.
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Choosing a wiki
A quick run-down of what I looked at when trying to choose a wiki for Septivium.
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Chart Hits 83
Some of my favourite tunes from a cassette compilation I had when I was twelve. And why mainstream nostalgia makes us neglect things.
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Septivium
I’ve started a new site, about learning everything.
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A new kind of front page
A step towards a better front page for an individual’s aggregated content on the web.
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Flickr, Getty and the greater good
The new Flickr/Getty arrangement is good for those aiming to get into stock photography, but not for the Creative Commons
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What am I up to?
For everyone who thinks I’m just being an actor or something now.